Rand is talking about "buying" a blog and community for your website and brand, when the brand doesn't already have one beyond simple customer transactions. So yes, Rand is saying the blog owners "relocate" and become an integral part of the company's website/brand.

Kris seems to be focusing more on the external aspect of purchasing blogs, but leaving them as they are... on their own demain, and keeping the purchased blog's own "branding" intact as it is. Instead of integrating the blog into your website, you just sprinkle little goodies like links throughout the blog in places like old posts and such.

Both ideas have their benefits. Rand's idea, however, has the added benefit of growing your brand's community strength, and not just pure ranking strength.

As far as backlash against Google for more "paid ad" content, the complaints wouldn't be in the form of verbal dissatisfaction, but rather people simple ignoring the ads more due to their heightened awareness of their existence. Humans (well, at least Americans and Western Europeans from my knowledge) are growing to distrust endorsements and ads that are obviously paid for more and more.

Amusingly this might have an unsusual counter effect... If less people are clicking on the ads, that means a greater number of advertisers are going to stay active in the bidding process over time, because it takes longer for their maximum spend allotment for the day/week/month to be consumed. With more and more advertisers staying in the bidding, because their isn't enough click traffic for them to spend their budgets, bid rates will probably increase overall. If bid rates increase, a large number of advertisers (small businesses) would be forced to drop out of the PPC game, because their costs per acquisition would rise too high.

2012 could definitely be the year we see a ceiling on how far traditional PPC advertising can grow. Not promising anything, though... and "ReMarketing" and social (Facebook) advertising are entirely different worlds.

It's all food for thought, and I'm of course not the "all knowing expert" on this subject!

You are correct. Both Maile Ohye and Matt Cutts stated that they do not like to see the canonical tag being used this way.

Interestingly I'll also say that, for the time, if you were to use the canonical tag in this way... it does work. I spoke with the lead online marketing developer at a very large e-retailer, and he stated that they have been using this approach to get over the problem for awhile and have not seen an issues with the search engine's from it.. yet.

Yes, but it will require coding knowledge. PHP and HTML/CSS primarily. You need to be able to dig into the various root elements of your theme, and especially be able to change the comments.php template file.

Sadly there isn't any sort of plugin I'm aware of that would be able to get this done for you.

Paddy's primary point (alliteration for the win) was that many ecommerce sites simply work on their SEO efforts, get traffic coming to their site (whatever the landing pages may be), and then pat themselves on the back for a job well done. They don't even think to look and make sure that the traffic is actually making it to a page where they might convert and buy something.

If you're getting a conversion, that's a good thing. If you know where and why those conversions are happening, that's a better thing. If you know where the conversions are not happening, but are supposed to be, and can find out why they aren't - that's the best thing!

If searchers aren't making it to your specific product pages, and you can figure out why and fix it, then you're likely looking at a decent conversion % increase. Likewise if you see that people are converting from your site internal SERP's, or from the home page, you could build out those efforts more heavily if you weren't already and see another conversion % increase. Track, track, track, and then track again.

You raise an interesting point, which I believe can be seen two ways. One way being how you stated, that there is no matching content on the page targeted by the canonical tag.

The second way has to deal with the "essence" of what rel canonical is about. The tag is supposed to give credit to the originator of the content on any given URL. So what if someone wrote a piece of content for another company's website/userbase, and said company wanted to give that person the credit for doing so? If said person does not want to create the same page of content on their own website, than the company could just use the canonical tag to say, "Hey, we have this awesome article on our website, but we really aren't responsible for its creation. That credit should go to this guy at ...".

I'd argue in that situation the canonical tag is certainly an appropriate and white hat tactic to use.

The simple answer of it is that you now have to make sure you are giving good answers in order to earn points. Far too many times I've seen extremely substandard answers (substandard by my view at least) pushed out in the Q&A section just so someone could grab the bonus Mozpoints for being the first answer within the 4 hour period.

Whenever I go to the Q&A section to answer questions, I do so wanting to find interesting discussion and to hopefully help someone. Not to earn MozPoints. The points are just a fun little side game for me. My true goal is to get someone to mark my answer as helpful, or even have it SEOMoz endorsed... because then I know that I actually did something good for someone else.

In short, the goal of the Q&A section is to help others and explore discussions. Not to earn MozPoints.

They can easily be solved by adding a tag to every affected page referencing the proper page URL. It almost never hurts to simply have a on every page of your website referencing back to itself, just to be safe and sure. For search sorts I would add just a noindex tag, because they usually have little SEO SERP result value as it is... so it easily defeats the problem.

This is exactly why when my company takes on a new client we make sure they understand that we will not be delivering them 50 page reports. If they specifically ask us to create the lengthy reports, we advise them that it's just going to eat up their billing time for something that is no more effective than a 1-2 page actionable report we can write and deliver in 30 minutes.

Most clients are usually quite happy that we're so upfront with our method of doing things in this manner, as well as efficient because of it.

After hearing SEOMoz's past in full, I realize how much I have in common with Rand. I won't bore anyone here, but needless to say it seems like the biggest and only major difference is that he took SEOMoz into the research/toolset side of things, and I'm continuing down the Consultancy side as I enjoy the challenge it specifically brings.

Entrepreneurs are the people I respect the most in the business world, because they have the courage to go out and do what is the hardest (in my possibly biased opinion) task a person can take on in business... starting and raising a company. As I said, though, I may be biased on this being an entrepreneur myself.

I think it's entirely reasonable to assume that the search engine's would do certain quality checks against the microformat declarations.

Like if you say that one page on your site is dedicated to the movie 'Inception', the engines are smart enough to scan your content - figure out if it really is relevant to Inception, and then further figure out if your spamming the same EXACT thing on the rest of your site or if this certaing page is indeed unique and fresh.

So the engines get the benefit of you being able to tell them exactly what your intent is, and all they need to do (to oversimplify it) is quality check what you're saying and verify it.

If I'm understanding you correctly I would think that idea would be too easily manipulatable.

First you have to make sure that "impersonators" don't pop up. That way I can't go off and trick Google into thinking that I am actually Matt Cutts and start ranking my newly built website immediately because of it.

Next if you can get over any sort of impersonation problem, there's an issue where just because someone is good at one topic doesn't mean they're good on every topic.

For the time being calculating ranking based on the page/domain entity is better than based on the human entity in my opinion. Although the idea does have interesting possibility... the biggest limiting factor is a lack of technology and computing power to achieve it. Just like how google would have had a hard time implementing something like LDA back in 1999.

It would seem that what you're describing, Rand, is potentially one of the largest shifts in 'how search functions' that has ever been seen.

To elaborate - Search ranking algorithms for the past 10+ years have been focused heavily on "single page" efforts. What I mean is that the engines look at things on a page by page basis. They get to a page and figure out what the predominent keywords are, how many links that page is receiving, and what the anchor text is for those links. It's all based on a page-centric type model.

Recently the SEO world has seen indicators like domain authority popping into prominence. Domain authority is obviously very different from traditional page based metrics. I have a feeling that in Google's playing around with the concept of domain authority they've sort of "seen the light" - to be lame and cliche.

What you're describing to me sounds like a 'Domain Authority v2.0'. Search engines will start to focus on large, domain wide indicators rather than the page based ones of the past.

This would of course also help combat the horrible content farms that have been killing SERPs as of late. The content farms try to cover a wide variety of topics with less-than-mediocre content, and rely on the traditional on page indicators as well as their current DA to achieve rankings for such. This new approach cold very well serve to end their reign.

I apologize if my post seems really choppy and not fluid. I'm just having my first cup of coffee for the day, so my brain isn't completely up to par just yet...

We know Google is likely to figure out a way to solve this solution, because it is in their best interest as a search engine. Whether it involves new ranking algorithm factors, or manually reviewing the most successful websites (and thus the ones usually most responsible for SERP pollution), the future for content farms as they are in current form is not a bright one.

Once that happens the content farms are most likely going to be forced down one of two paths.

1) They can stay the course they're on now, and hope to rank for whatever terms they do not have legitimate competition for. This is a slowly losing war for them.

2) They are forced to put out quality content. The problem here is that the cost for them to produce high quality content may well be higher than the potential profit they will make from that content for the immediate and intermediate future. Granted they might be successful in this, but then we SEO's just have even more of a reason to exist and help our clients outrank the competition.

It is certainly a frustrating issue. Right now I'm trying to overcome a content farm as competition for one of my clients... and the content farm has a DA of 71. Meh.

I get the feeling that Google's stance on issues like this are rather neutral. They likely feel that unless a website is maliciously trying to affect their users, or the website is using exceptionally backhanded and misleading means - then everyone should have a chance at the index.

Is eHow the best source available for the infromation they publish? I personally don't believe so. But at the same time, they aren't intentionally trying to 'hurt' anyone, and they are at least providing potentially useful information.

Sadly, for the moment at least, it's a grey area that no one can actually give a concrete answer for. Only the individual search engines can make their stance on the issue known.

Is SEO moral? Well first of all, I think that is an improper question.

Here let me give two example scenarios real quick.

Company A uses SEO to rank for key search terms in their line of business. Due to their good rankings from SEO, they know they now also need to provide great products/services, reasonable prices, and wonderful customer service as well so that their hard/expensive SEO work will not be for naught. Is this moral? Company A is obviously using SEO to help deliver people the wonderful experience they were hoping to find. I don't see how it couldn't be moral.

Company B uses SEO to force their way into as many unrelated rankings as possible. Their entire intent is to do a "smash and grab" type approach... that is, attract as many people as possible quickly, grab their money, and disappear. They do not intend to offer a good product. They do not intend to follow up with exemplary customer service. Is this moral? I think everyone would agree it certainly is not.

Now there are of course grey areas between Company A and Company B, but the basic premise of it all is this: SEO is neither moral or immoral. SEO is a tool. The people who use the SEO are the ones who are (im)moral.

This whole argument can be carried over to Google itself to further the example. Is Google immoral because they display immoral websites in their search index? Or are they inherently moral because they try to keep only moral websites to the top of the rankings? Even in this instance I get the feeling that Google is a neutral tool in itself. The search engine is merely trying to accomplish the role it was designed for.

Just as SEO is trying to accomplish the role it was created for. The way that the SEO is actually used is where the key to this moral/immoral debate lies.

Everyone here is debating whether or not some of these tactics really should be avoided, correct?.. If they are indeed a waste of time, or a valuable quick fix?

At the very least we can all agree that the majority of the controversial items on this list would be considered Black Hat, yes? With that thought I would like to remind everyone of a certain, simple fact...

SEO is not dead. SEO is evolving into something more. As the nature of the business matures, trying to simply grab anchor text links from every imaginable low quality source is likely to become increasingly less effective.

FB and Twit links are sort of a "safer" investment of your time, because you do not need to worry about them being removed by a moderator or being nofollowed (unlike forums/blog comments).

Second, recent experiments have been suggesting that FB/Twitter links might provide a stronger initial boost to a pages strength than traditional types of links. Key term there being "initial". I'm sure it plays in with Google's love of QDF.

Soo, am I the only one who actually ran off to see if Ricky Gervais indeed did a funny video about transparantizing? Heh... I mean... uh... how's the weather today?

Anyway, great timing on this article, Rand. I just finished doing some work very similar to this for a client.

He operates a rather sizable independent auto repair garage, and was looking to market his company as a specialist for a certain make of vehicle. Well a mechanic of course is looking to target local business, and my research was showing that there weren't many people directly searching for a "InsertVehicleMake" specialist in the local market.

My solution? Come out with some interesting and informative content from a professional's (the mechanic in question) point of view about various topics regarding the vehicle type. One was about how this certain type of car has recently grown much more reliable under new ownership, and thus is now a better value to own if you're looking for a new car.
Another article is about how the manufacturer recently developed an awesome new technology for their cars which provided an immediate benefit to the owner... and their mechanic! (see the tie-in there?).

Keep in mind that many times local newspapers, who usually have strong websites, are looking for good Op-Ed pieces to publish for their reader base (a form of guest blogging). It's all about widening your view and finding the opportunities.

I agree, and this observation has been... well, observed... many times.

When people are completely satisfied by a product or service they have received they usually resign themselves to a mental state of complacence. They will almost never talk about the satisfaction they were given by the subject, unless someone in their immediate life brings up the topic or is looking for feedback on it.

Counter to this - if a person feels like they have been wronged (whether fairly or not) part of the coping mechanism we humans have is to outwardly express our views on the matter. Anger and negative emotions are very strong 'right now' motivators.

This is why it isn't uncommon for a business to find they have an overall negative online review presence if they have not been keeping up with things. I'm sure we've all had to advise businesses to actively encourage their customers to post a review on Google Places, or Yelp, or wherever. We know, if only subconsciously, that all the clients who have had a good experience with the subject business need a little external motivation to spread the word about their story - whereas the minority with the bad experiences have all the internal motivation to yell about it high on the mountain... even to that random guy walking by in the yellow shirt who otherwise couldn't care less.